Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 113

Requirements Engineering for Enterprise
Systems: What We Know and What
We Don't Know?

Maya Daneva and Roel Wieringa

Abstract This chapter presents research progress in Requirements Engineering
(RE) for enterprise systems (ES) with a view to formulating current challenges and
a promising research agenda for the future. In the field of ES, many RE approaches
have been launched and tried out in the past decade, however most of them are
over-expensive and their effectiveness is unpredictable. Our goal in this chapter is
to make an inventory of the approaches discussed in literature, to evaluate the qual-
ity of evidence available regarding whether these approaches actually worked, and
to identify promising directions for future RE research efforts. Our results indicate
(i) that while there are significant achievements, the primary goal of RE for ES is
only partly achieved and (ii) that the field is likely to remain very challenging due to
the increasingly more pronounced cross-organizational aspects of RE in ES projects
(e.g. cross-organizational coordination, trust). At the same time, the need for prac-
tical, efficient and effective RE approaches will grow as the importance of ES in
today's extended enterprises is growing.

1 Introduction

For at least a decade, the elicitation, documentation and negotiation of the require-
ments for systems based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components have
been regarded as an important sub-area of Requirements Engineering (RE). An
important example of a project dealing with COTS-based system is the imple-
mentation of an enterprise solution based on packaged software, or the so-called
Enterprise Systems (ES) . 1 Typically, ES are large and multi-component systems that